Family favorites from our kitchen, posted here so I can find them again!

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Menu planning, part 2

So far this fall I'm doing a lot better menu planning. Our schedule is different and I think it's actually better than is has been the last couple of years. It's really helped to sit down on Saturday or Sunday and plan out the menus for the week. The girls also have been making notes on my menu of things they'd like to see on the menu the following week so that's really making things easier. They both still cook one night a week, alternating weeks. Now I just need to figure out when to get to the grocery store and we'll be set.

One thing we're doing this year is having family breakfasts instead of dinner which is requiring me to menu plan a bit better for breakfast. We still have days when it's GYO - get your own, but I fix something most mornings. Years ago when I was working, a friend said that he and his (live-in) girlfriend were menu planning. Their plan was something like pasta on Mondays, taco Tuesdays, fish on Fridays, etc., this gave them the broad outline and they'd fill in the details weekly. At the time I thought that was weird, why would you want pasta every Monday? Now I see the light, at least for breakfast, so Dean, I apologize for thinking you were weird for doing this.

So our breakfast plan is something like this (as always, subject to change):

As we get further into winter, I'll probably have days I know I'm cooking in the crockpot (Wednesday and Thursday) just because I'll be away at dinner time and need to leave food for the family that's home. So I sort of follow a generic plan but not really.